Nederlandse Taalkunde - Volume 22, Issue 3, 2017

Mapping dialects in North-Limburg and the adjacent German region. How relevant is the Uerdinger line as dividing line?

The Uerdingen isogloss is claimed to define the border between the Kleverlandish and South Lower Franconian dialect areas, both in the Netherlands and Germany. In earlier research we concluded that the border between these two dialect areas had to be reduced to other isoglosses. In this study we aim to give a definite answer on the basis of the Wenker survey data. As in our earlier studies, we applied the strategy of selecting the dialect variants of the most common words on both sides of the state border. We again applied two research methods in computing linguistic distances, one based on carefully classifying linguistic features, the other one based on string distances. The results turned out to converge. We found two dialect areas in Germany and three in the Netherlands. The Uerdinger line was not a main dialect border, on either side of the state border. We found breaks in the old dialect continuum crossing the state border. On the Dutch side a middle zone has appeared that could emerge because of the state border of 1815. The result is that the border of the Kleverlandish and South Franconian dialect areas runs more to the north in the Netherlands.

This paper discusses one subtype of semi-insubordination in Dutch, viz. adverbial and adjectival semi-insubordinate dat-constructions (e.g. Misschien/Leuk dat hij komt ‘Maybe/nice that he comes’). These constructions display an unusual syntactic status in that they consist of a (formally) subordinate dat-clause which is preceded by just one adverb or adjective, instead of a full matrix clause. In this study, I will outline the semantic, structural and functional properties of semi-insubordinate dat-constructions by reviewing previous accounts of this phenomenon against empirical corpus data. The data show that there are basically two types of initial elements in semi-insubordinate dat-constructions: evaluative and discursive ones. Both subtypes challenge traditional syntactic analyses in that they extend beyond the sentence level: they represent syntactically independent units, but pragmatically they are highly dependent on prior discourse. It will therefore be argued that it is essential to include aspects of discourse organization in the analysis of semi-insubordinate dat-constructions.

This paper provides a quantitative variationist analysis of the future markers gaan and zullen in modern spoken Dutch in the light of current discussion on grammaticalisation. In order to determine to what extent gaan has been grammaticalised, internal constraints on the distribution of gaan and zullen such as verb type, animacy of subject, grammatical person, clause type, sentence type and proximity of future reference are investigated, using Netherlandic and Belgian data from the Corpus of Spoken Dutch. The purpose of investigating constraints such as animacy of subject and proximity of future reference is to establish to what extent the behaviour of gaan is still determined by its lexical history (i.e. as a verb denoting motion towards an immediate goal), and results demonstrate that these two constraints persist in modern Dutch. Moreover, research on grammaticalisation in other languages has shown that grammaticalised markers can become specialised to certain morphosyntactic environments such as particular grammatical persons or types of clause. Indeed, it will be shown here that the use of gaan is favoured in subordinate clauses and non-first person utterances, which it has in common with English be going to. By contrast, zullen is shown to occur in pragmatically more nuanced contexts, indicated by the presence of modal particles.

In this study, we present a corpus-based comparison of the use of intensifying constructions in written L1 Dutch (Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands) and written L1 French (Frantext). We subsequently discuss intensification in Dutch as a second language (L2 Dutch) by French-speaking learners (Leerdercorpus Nederlands). The analysis adopts a constructional perspective (Goldberg 2006, Tomasello 2003) and aims to contrast French and Dutch preferences for morphological and syntactic intensifying constructions. Extending on the “Germanic Sandwich Hypothesis” (Van Haeringen 1956, Lamiroy 2011), we expect to find: i) more morphological intensifying constructions in Dutch, such as ‘elative’ compounds (e.g. knalrood ‘completely red’; Hoeksema 2012) and ii) more syntactic constructions in French, such as adverbial modification (e.g. tout rouge ‘completely red’) and adjective reduplication (e.g. rouge rouge ‘completely red’). The present study thus serves a twofold purpose: investigating whether the synthetic vs. analytic character of Germanic vs Romance languages holds in the domain of intensification, and on a more applied level, it contributes to identifying possible difficulties for French-speaking learners of Dutch in this field. Our corpus study partly confirms the expected difference in the use of morphological intensifying constructions between L1 Dutch and L1 French, with significantly more morphological intensifying constructions in L1 Dutch than in L1 French. Adverbial modification remains the default intensifying construction in both languages however. Whilst L2 Dutch productions displayed an overuse of intensifying adverbs (partly due to the overuse of ‘all-round’ intensifiers such as heel ‘very’), the learners did however also use elative compounds, a typical Germanic intensifying construction.

The topic of this article is sibilant palatalisation in the speech of Moroccan-Dutch youth from Gouda, a small city in the Netherlands. In the first part of the article, sibilant palatalisation is described as a variable feature of Moroccan-Dutch speech, which mainly occurs in restricted phonetic and lexical contexts. In the second part some of the data will be explored more closely through the lens of stance-taking. By adopting this particular approach a different light is thrown on the concept of the Moroccan Dutch ethnolect. Sibilant palatalisation, which can function as a stance marker, should not be solely viewed as a linguistic marker of ethnic identity.